Grief over Death of Mr. Ikuo Hirayama

It was raining in Nanjing on December 2, 2009. On the morning of this cold winter day, I was shocked to learn that Mr. Ikuo Hirayama had passed away in Tokyo at the age of 79. He was an outstanding cultural envoy as well as a world-renowned artist. For more than half a century, following the footsteps of Xuan Zang (the 7th Century Chinese Buddhist monk, scholar and traveler who journeyed to India in search of knowledge) and overcoming many hardships, he had traveled along the ancient Silk Road many times and created a large number of exquisite and extraordinary paintings. He served as UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador for 20 years and made prominent contributions to the restoration and preservation of the Imperial Tombs of the Gaogouli Kingdom (known as Koguryo to Westerners), the Angkor Wat temples of Cambodia, the Mogao Grottoes in Dunhuang in Western China, the Bamyan Buddhas of central Afghanistan (destroyed by the Taliban in 2001), and the Ming Dynasty city wall in Nanjing.

Fourteen years ago, Mr. Hirayama, then President of the Japan-China Friendship Association, proposed the two countries should cooperate in renovating the ancient city wall of Nanjing. His proposal received enthusiastic responses from personages and organizations in Japan promoting friendship with China. Mr. Hirayama visited Nanjing many times to paint from life. The large number of paintings based on Nanjing’s city wall he created was displayed in all major Japanese cities on an exhibition tour and the proceeds from these exhibitions and sales of his paintings were all donated to the wall repair project. In the three years when the project was being carried out, nearly 20,000 Japanese came to Nanjing to take part in the renovation work and to make donations. In the words of Mr. Hirayama, they were “trying, through concrete action, to heal the trauma the people in Nanjing experienced in the war launched by Japan”. I was fortunate to work as his interpreter in those years and learned much about him. Mr. Hirayama was born in the city of Hiroshima in 1930. At the age of 15, he survived the atomic bomb that destroyed his city. He graduated from the Department of Japanese Painting of the Tokyo School of Art (the present-day Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, the only national art university in Japan). The Propagation of Buddhism he created in 1959 when he was critically ill, suffering from radiation sickness with his white blood cell count plummeting, made him known in the Japanese art circles. His later well-known works included Meditation into Nirvana and Dream for Pregnancy. And he gradually became one of Japan’s top painters. Because of his a-bomb experience, Mr. Hirayama took “working for peace” as his lifelong pursuit and launched the campaign for the joint renovation of the ancient city wall of Nanjing in the hope that the Chinese and Japanese people would forever live in peace and friendship.

Mr. Hirayama was over 60 when I first met him. He wore a pair of gold-rimmed glasses and had the bearing of a scholar. He was a man of few words and always had an amiable smile on his face. Having learned about his devotion to art and the cause of peace despite the hardships he had gone through, I felt a great respect for him.

Mr. Hirayama not only loved Chinese culture, but also cared about the Chinese people. In his early years, he donated 200 million Japanese yen (15 million RMB) for rescuing Dunhuang fresco art and, in 2003, when SARS epidemic hit China, he took the lead in making donations and through the media called on the Japanese people to help the Chinese people overcome the epidemic at an early date. He showed great concern for education in China, setting up the Hirayama Education Fund for Chinese youth to pursue further education in Japan. He also donated to help set up Hope Project primary schools in Yunnan, Tibet and Hebei. A Chinese who had studied in Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music said that, as President of the University, Mr. Hirayama would encourage the students to make painstaking efforts to study Chinese culture, attributing his success in art to the enlightenment from and influence of the fresco art of Dunhuang at every annual school opening ceremony.

Behind every successful man there is a great woman. It was no exception for Mr. Hirayama. Michiko has been his schoolmate at the Tokyo School of Art and was an excellent student of painting. She stopped painting altogether after she married Mr. Hirayama, for she believed that “There can only be one great painter in a family.” Over the past few decades, Michiko has assisted Mr. Hirayama in his work and brought up their son, Ren, to become a well-known biologist. After the completion of the Ikuo Hirayama Museum of Art in his birthplace Setoda-cho in Onomichi City, Hiroshima Prefecture, Michiko devoted a lot of time and energy in arranging the displays and in the operation and management of the museum. It has now become the most famous window on culture in Hiroshima and drawn a total of 2.7 million visitors in the 13 years since its opening.

In the evening of that December winter day, I saw a crescent moon in the sky through the window. It reminded me of Mr. Hirayama’s well-known work Moonlight over Loulan. The moon on the canvas bore a striking resemblance to the one in the evening sky that day; but the man who had drawn the moon is gone.

May you rest in peace, Mr. Ikuo Hirayama.